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Kollar Fellow Studies Little-Known Racist Archive

The firm Currier & Ives, self-described as
“publishers of cheap and popular prints,” is
well known for depicting scenes of American
life, showing people at work in the building of
cities and railroads; Currier & Ives also produced
lithograph prints of American families at play,
with their images of holiday winter scenes
and sporting, patriotic, and historical events.
The impact of their images on the American
imagination was far-reaching: In their 73
years (1834-1907) of producing at least 7,500
lithograph images, two to three new images
every day, the firm defined life for the industrious
American middle class. Thanks to the Allen
and Mary Kollar fellowship for students doing
work on literature and the visual arts, graduate
student Melanie Hernandez was able to travel to
the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester,
Massachusetts, to study a little-known archive
of grotesque Currier & Ives images that is
uncharacteristic of the rest of their catalogue, a
collection called the Darktown Series.

Unlike images in their general catalog, Currier
& Ives’ Darktown Series depicts recently freed,
upwardly mobile African Americans “play-acting”
at being white, but every endeavor runs amok,
ends in disaster, and frequently ends in bloodshed.
These cartoon images were apparently meant to
be funny. Hernandez undertook a complex cultural
reading, revealing the particular ideologies of
race at play in these constructions: “The violence
in these images is enacted on black bodies, but
is not enacted directly by white people. Instead
it is inferior biology or fate intervening, an
invisible hand or self-inflicted injury that causes
the bloodshed and violence.” The implication is
that the character in the lithograph is someone
who aspires to a position that is beyond his/
her capability, so Nature or Fate will intervene
to maintain the so-called natural order. These
images supported the late 19th-century
paternalistic and pseudoscientific arguments that
enslaved Blacks benefited by being close to and
protected by their white masters.

These Currier & Ives images are distinctly
different from the lynching photographs
common during this historical period because
the Darktown Series conceals who is performing
the violence. Currier & Ives was not the only
Northern publisher producing similar images.
Earlier comics circulated in antebellum illustrated
periodicals take as their thematic content
concerns over the rise of the black middle class,
but the tenor of those comics is more lighthearted
than the violence narrated in Darktown.

Hernandez notes that her archival work took
her in an unexpected direction-children’s
literature. Like the progression from lighthearted
fun to gruesome violence documented in adult
visuals, Hernandez tracks a similar trajectory
in children’s literature at this same time period.
Amongst others, she compares several versions
of a popular children’s picture book, Ten Little
Niggers, noting that the illustrations also
grow increasingly violent as the 19th century
progresses towards post-Reconstruction and
the rise of Jim Crow. According the Hernandez,
“These books taught whole new generations about
racist hatred.”

After the turn of the 20th century, Currier &
Ives went out of business; as a consequence, all of
their lithograph stones were destroyed except the
Darktown Series, which was sold at auction and
believed to have ended up in England. Hernandez
discovered that a lot of collectors don’t want to
display or sell the Darktown Series because it
is now seen as a shameful part of a collection;
however, there remains a very small audience
within museums and archives that has remained
interested in the series. Hernandez argues that
“the way these prints have operated socially is
comparable to the way other artifacts like lynching
photos have. However, the Currier & Ives comics
erase the violence that they do because they
were considered funny, so the viewer didn’t have
to take them as seriously.” Hernandez is asking
on the one hand, “What is the work of comedy?
What is the violence that comedy can do?” and
on the other hand, “Did these images operate as
revenge fantasy for white audiences, a place in
which violence to African Americans is excused
and allowed?” Hernandez wants “to help readers
understand the kind of injury that cultural images
can do. It is important to study cultural artifacts,
not to treat them as disposable ephemera.”

University of Washington English Department
Maintained by
Nancy SiskoUpdated December 13 2014